This one will make your blood boil boys. Rape and pillage doesn't even BEGIN to describe it.

Click on the video (THIRD PIC) embedded in the blog.

GDITMMM!

That is Farkin BS!

Why all the waste? Doesn't make any sense.

UNBELIEVABLE!!!!!......All for the sake of......"Randolf, (snap snap)please drive me to the seaside restaurant so I can sample the lovely halibut cheeks and fresh Chilean sea bass,...I must have it"

Okay. A little overboard but I hope that boat full of clowns open peoples eyes to the devestation of our resources! Jerks.

I dont know if it still this way but the bycatch used to be larger than the catch quota.

If you read the comments, you'll also see that 90,000 chinook salmon per year also bit the dust in these habitat destroying drag nets.

I agree....makes your blood boil!

wow, that's one of the most obvious problems with the regulations protecting these guys...

Seems like there wasn't even any consideration for keeping their by-catch alive or to tally the number of turkeys they were suffocating!

Looked like only one in maybe 10 or 15 were going to survive release(if that's what you call it?)

How could any of this method of fishing be considered "clean"? They only sorted a handfull of flatfish anyway, look at all those halibut! Tragic...

While I agree with the comments, about the draggers. Why the link to the Aquarium's seafood watch?

Who can we write/complain to about this?

I spent a few years up north dragging.I was a deck hand for most of those 8 years.Never saw a chinook salmon.Did count a few chums though.probably 20 a year on my watch.They generally are too fast for a net working at 3-4 knots. the openings are huge and the first meshes are upwards 50' on a pelagic net.

Did kill our share of halibut though.mostly chickens like you saw.They come up and feed in the rookeries we fished.The big ones generally get out of harms way.Did get literally knocked out by a 400+that got down into the live tanks.I always thought that calling them live tank was a lot like naming the housing development after the small creek they just killed.The crew on the Snow King always felt bad about the halibut by catch and never treated them like you just saw.We treated them with kid gloves.

The observers on our boat sampled damn near every bag and if they did not,it was because of there own accord not because we were trying to pull a fast one.Some were out to save the world some were just putting in there time to finish there degrees.All young kids fresh from school,getting paid pennies.Back in my time the observer had to tally the tonage we caught as it went against a huge quota for the fleet.The season ended when the observers reports added up the quota.Halibut by-catch could and did a few times shut down the fisheries before the quota was reached.



I am not defending dragging just trying to give you some real observations from your side of the table.I did this as a kid .The romance of the Bering Sea is a powerful thing to a young man.At least it was to me.The best times of my life were being a c hair from death 200 miles from anything.Puts the world as we know it and the people in it in a whole knew light.

That being said dragging is one of the most harmful things we are doing to our oceans.There is the by catch then there is the habitat destruction.Bottom trawls destroy the bottom.My last few years they outlawed our bottom nets and made us ditch our rock gear.They have been taking huge steps in trying to clean up the fishery.One of the problems is that the trawl fleet is reely owned by the norwegians and they could give a rats ass what we or our government thinks.They do what they can get away with.I lucked out and worked for two Icelandic Bossuns under an American skipper.Villy would of thrown me overboard if I behaved as you saw in that video.I quit when the weegies bought our company and fire Villy and Toby just because they were Icelandic.I have absolutely no love for the square heads in the trawl buisness.Used to call them fcn L7s.

More of the world eats fish than eat beef.The world does need to eat.People are not going to work out there for free.This is reality folks.

Flame on.

OMG!WOW.Good luck,
STRIKE ZONE

No one is saying the world doesn't deserve to harvest precious marine resources to eat. The stewards among us are just demanding that it be done in a responsible, less destructive, less wasteful, SUSTAINABLE fashion.

What the trawlers are doing to the marine ecosystem is flat out UNSUSTAINABLE.

It MUST stop.

The sooner the better.

The only reason that they are starting to take these steps is because they have fished the stocks down already.They know it is unsustainable.Man kind always does this.If there is a lot of money involved we rape it then we talk about doing the right thing and then finally just before it is too late we start to do something about it.The people that are in charge of these things understand only one thing money.How much money was spent on getting the president elect in office.

There is a huge amount of money involved with these fisheries.I made money every year during A season.Our target was Pollock.Just like the chum salmon,the real target was the roe not the fillets.I can not remember the numbers any more but the gov had to mandate that we came back to port with a certain percentage of meat versus roe.Other wise we would of thrown the carcasas overboard and only kept top grade roe.And some still did.Called it high grading.Huge amounts (millions of tons) were tossed overboard to feed the crabs because the asians did not consider it top grade.tHEY HAVE DONR THE SAME THING WITH THE CHUM SALMON.Money talks [censored] walks.In this case the [censored] is anything that gets in the way of the money.

When are the sportsmen going get passed there emotions and reelize that it is not just the tribes or the small fisheries off our coast or Cali's or AK but the entire commercial industry united.we are talking Norway Japan China just to take a few off the top.billions of dollars. Like everything else big nothing will change until the folks on top,with the money see that they have to change.Just like with the auto industry.They make there money and then get out with there piece of the pie and the needed change begins to happen.Unfortunately it never happens until the resource is in shambles

I have seen the salmon waste, I know it happens maybe not on boats like this but it does happen. I have known observers and have been told of the incidental waste on boats like this. Yes,oh my god yes it should stop. We need some more activism and lobbyists ,as well as some media broadcasting the harm in this wasteful practice to protect all our fisheries from this type of fishing.

No need to flame, thanks for sharing your experience and letting us be a fly on the wall

god dammit

This.

What I don't understand is why they didn't take that halibut in and sell it. They killed it. I realize there will be bycatch, but to let that got to waste is horrible.

I've seen stories on the auctions ofr the roe, and understand that process, but the com'l fishermen need to limit their waste.

E-mails with links to video sent to Norm, Patty, and Maria.

Dear *** and Staff

I feel the need to bring this video clip to your attention as it highlights the obscene waste associated with industrial-scale trawling. This devastation of our precious marine resources MUST stop.

Please go to this URL to get to the video clip on the web.

http://www.piscatorialpursuits.com/forum...html#Post552801

Thanks for your attention and concern.

Francis Estalilla

Even if they do nothing, I just feel 1000 times better knowing that I at least brought it to their attention!

Dogfish-

They don't allow sale of bycatch because they are concerned that fishermen would then FOCUS their catch on "bycatch". Halibut is worth far more than flounder...

I'm one of the whiny sport charter fishermen who is lobbying for a share of the halibut pie. Right now in the state, longliners take roughly 64% of the halibut, trawlers kill 14%, and charter boats and private boats COMBINED take about 12%. That means that more fish are caught, crushed, and thrown back overboard each year than are caught with rod and reel. Now NOAA wants to cut back the amount sportfishermen on charter boats can harvest. NOAA seems fine with allowing 14% of the resource to be wasted, but the concept of 12% being caught by the American Public really rubs them wrong.

It should be noted that NOAA is at this time only trying to cut back on those halibut harvested by sportfishermen on charter boats, but in truth, charter boats are the only way that most Americans can have access to this public resource. Unless someone wants to drag their boat 3000 miles to Alaska and back, they're stuck going with a charter.

-david

The reason they do not allow them to sell the halibut is that it is likely much more valuable than there target species.

example would be a rock fish trip I did in the gulf.Our "target species was POP(Pacific Ocean Perch).The gov new it was impossible to cleanly target P.O.P..So they aloud us to process the by-catch.I think 17% could be Black cod.Black Cod was worth FAR more than P.O.P.We made sure that we had our full allowed % of Black cod.This meant grading our catch in the sorting room i.e throwing fish overboard.we threw tons of P.O.P and pacific mackeral overboard to get the 17% of black cod.Ultimately we were targeting Black cod.They are afraid this would happen with halibut also.This by the way was done on a boat with a norwegian first mate.First mate my as.

They have changed the quotas to facilitate a lot less waste forcing them to proccess much more of what they catch versus solely targeting one species.

I think that they should be forced to process all they catch but not necesarily being able to sell the fish at market value.Problem is that it would drive the price of "Halibut" down.The halibut lobby would fight this tooth and nail.edit:If all they caught came out of there quota they would be more likely to fish in ways that would mean less by-catch.